Wunderman Thompson has developed a technology that enables the analysis of consumers' emotional responses to advertisements. This technology also identifies the specific elements within a video that capture their attention. This valuable insight allows clients to make adjustments to their advertising campaigns in order to achieve the desired emotional response from their audience.Reveal, the new technology, combines traditional creative testing techniques with proprietary and licensed technology. Clients select a group of consumers, provided by panel providers, which match their target audience. This panel will then opt to have their faces recorded “for a couple of minutes” as they watch the client’s video ad — similar to how ‘measurement providers measure audience attention levels’. Wunderman Thompson’s machine learning model then analyses the recording for seven micro expressions: anger, disgust, fear, happy, neutral, sad and surprise. The agency has also licensed technology that tracks consumers’ eyes as they focus on specific objects within a video.Face tracking is combined with feedback from a consumer survey. This process can take a weak; after the analysis, the video recordings are deleted.It took about eight months to create the tool. The company decided to develop a proprietary emotions detection model because existing models, such as those within Google’s Cloud Vision API, were limited to macro expressions.Lucile Ripa, Head, Analytics and Data Science, Wunderman Thompson, said: “Our promise is that we are faster and quicker [than other creative testing] because we’ve got all this automation, so it will not take months and months to build a big report full of KPIs, we want to be much more agile and dynamic to be able to test our clients’ creative at multiple points — not only when it’s completely final.”The agency believes this will result in more effective ads as well as a better consumer experience.David Lloyd, EMEA Managing Director, Wunderman Thompson-Data shares: “Essentially, we’re just trying to measure positive emotions so that ultimately we get more positive emotions from consumers seeing the ads.”According to Wunderman Thompson, it has lined up trials of the solution with some of its “major” clients, including one in travel and leisure, over the coming weeks and months.Lloyd added: “We know we’re not going to be able to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft in terms of their investment in data science and technology. So we have a lot of focus around what we do and what we don’t do.”